Getting ready for school

Saturday

Aug 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Northern blue skies and the great late summer weather beckon locals and visitors outdoors in this special place we call home. While many of us try to squeeze one more wonderful day out of the season, area teachers must prepare for a return to the classroom.

Northern blue skies and the great late summer weather beckon locals and visitors outdoors in this special place we call home. While many of us try to squeeze one more wonderful day out of the season, area teachers must prepare for a return to the classroom.
If you haven’t tried to prepare for a school year spent standing in front of a couple of dozen youngsters full of extra energy and hormones, you don’t have any idea what happens in the life of most teachers during the last half of August.
It’s hard work. And it is hard to do during the best weather of the year in northern Michigan, when the rest of us are enjoying the sweet days at the end of summer.
In late August teachers must ready themselves for the awesome responsibility of educating our kids. This task gets harder and more complicated every year. State and federal mandates add to the need for more preparation. As an example, the recent wrestling match over establishing a common core curriculum for reading and math will no doubt make things even harder.
Most people recognize the importance of good teachers, but somehow our nation has had a problem giving teachers credit for the good work they do. Many other counties seem to elevate the status and compensation of their teachers more than we do here. Norway, Sweden and Finland come to mind as nations that recognize and reward the importance of excellent educators.
In America we tend to focus on the fallacy that teachers don’t put in a full day’s work. If you add prep time, after school responsibilities and the homework of correcting papers and responding to student needs, the teachers I know put in plenty of overtime. Salaries and status in our society simply are not commensurate with the responsibilities and work load of the average teacher. Comments regarding teachers having summers off are also misleading. If you add up the time it takes for continuing education and the prep time a good teacher puts in during the summer months, a teacher’s vacation time isn’t much more than the average worker with seniority. And I can tell you from personal experience the stress level on teachers can be much greater than that on folks that have chosen other careers.
The teaching challenge continues to evolve. When I taught in U.P. high schools in the early 80s, it was becoming difficult to get parents involved with their kid’s education.
According to reports that problem has gotten worse. People seem to have less and less time for their children’s education, too often leaving that huge responsibility to professional educators. Teachers will tell you that student success is almost always linked directly to the amount of support and follow-up parents give the educational process. The best teachers and great schools cannot make progress with a student without proper support from home.
As parents and grandparents we should know what is going on at school, make sure the homework is getting done and stay in touch with our child’s teachers. Students spend 75 percent of their time out of the classroom during the school year. Is it wise or fair to place 100 percent of the responsibility for a student’s education on teachers, when they only see them for 25 percent of the time during the 180 days or so that school is in session?
While enjoying the fantastic northern Michigan weather for that one last time this season, consider ways to help support your child’s teachers this coming school year. We should all be getting ready for school this fall, not just the teachers opening up a musty classroom during the best days of August.